So, slogging along between bouts of accounting, and IT frustration, I am recreating in the evening by reading my copy of “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease …”. It is slow going and were I not so interested in the “model” I might not be reading this book, it is definitely not a page turner.

On the other hand It also works way better than sleeping pills, so you win some you lose some. It is heavy going but understandable with a couple of years of university biology and chemistry under my belt and a wife who studied organic chem to whom I direct questions on occasion.

It is both discouraging in its recounting of the past 50 years and very encouraging of my fasting Keto lifestyle. I have posted snippets here and there when I found stuff clearly relevant to fasting and Keto, but for starters, a revisit to the Forward (by Dr. Peter Pedersen, Professor of Biological Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD):

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Peter Pedersen, PhD

“Cancer persists as a major disease of mortality and is afflicting more people today than ever before. Few families remain untouched by this insidious and vicious disease. In fact, cancer is predicted to overtake heart disease as the prime cause of death in industrialized societies during this century (21st). …

The Nobel laureate, Otto Warburg, was the first to provide evidence during the early part of the last century for the involvement of disturbed respiration with compensatory fermentation (glycolosis) as a common property of cancer, thus perceived to be related to its uncontrolled growth and progression. Few subjects have been as controversial in the cancer field as Otto Warburg and his theory of cancer. … “

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And now we are reading Chapter Four “Energetics of Normal Cells and Cancer Cells”, and we find the following:

“METABOLIC HOMEOSTASIS: Homeostasis is the tendency of biological systems to maintain relatively stable conditions in their internal environment” and “This is especially important for humans that follow a feast/fast schedule of nutrient supply. Metabolic homeostasis within cells is dependent … on the energy supply to the membrane pumps. Hormones such as Insulin and Glucagon can regulate global system energy homeostasis in order to maintain steady energy balance within the cells of each organ.”

That is just the simple introduction to the chapter explaining how the above “Energetics” process takes place, at the microscopic level, in every cell and organ of our body, every second of every day of our lives. And if even a bit of it goes wrong then we die … in this case by Cancer … but there are many other killers opportunistically waiting for us, “the self”, to deviate from the “Manufacturers Instructions” and set off into the empty blank part of the map where lie “Dragons”.

And the complexity about which I am reading intuitively leads me to reject the hypothesis that reality is all just accidental random chemical processes. In my primitive ignorance I simply can’t accept the Material Naturalist or Secular Humanist view reducing everything to chemical accidents. The machinery is far too precise and complex to be an accident of evolution. I find myself coming up against the idea of “irreducible complexity”.

It seems that “Darwin’s theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost completely useless, and the object of superstitious awe.” Dr. David Berlinski, Philosophy. Darwinism is just another mutation, a religion by any other name. Even Darwin didn’t believe what modern materialists and humanists believe.

” … More recently, evolutionists point to genetic similarities between species to bolster Darwinian views of evolution. It has been widely reported that the human genome and that of the chimpanzee share about 95-98 percent similar DNA. This is used by material naturalists to bolster their arguments against the exceptionality of human beings in nature.

But why would we not expect God to use the same material for many different things? We use metal for children’s toys, skyscrapers, mechanical limbs and bombs. Rather, the more obvious question is how much then can the physical genome actually explain? While there are some obvious physical similarities between apes and humans, there are vast differences in our behaviors, histories and abilities.

This argument seems only to suggest that DNA studies may not be sufficient to describe the radical differences between the species. Why if there are such similarities at a molecular level are there so many differences in nature? No chimpanzee, ape or similar animal has ever set up complex societies, built houses, produced works of art and music, developed an oral or written language, or studied itself.

Where do these tremendous differences come from? Perhaps, as salmon scientist Ernie Brannon suggests, there is something more to the biblical explanation that God breathed his spirit into man and made him in his image than is thus far evident in the gene pool.

Intelligent design. On sabbatical in 1993, Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson began reading about the theory of evolution. From his position as a lawyer, he reasoned that the theory lacked evidence. He later wrote asking some troubling questions about Darwin’s theory.

From this beginning, Johnson attracted other scientists with similar concerns. These now form a group of scientists and philosophers who collectively refer to themselves as intelligent design theorists and scientists.

Biochemist Michael Behe, famous for the study of the bacterial flagellum, argues that certain biological systems would have to have been assembled in one fell swoop in order to function. His argument on “irreducible complexity” dovetails with the argument of philosopher William Dembski’s notion of “specified complexity,” revealing the impossibility of particular complex systems to have emerged in the manner described in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.

ID proponents scientifically analyze systems in astronomy, biology, physics and chemistry to determine whether the observed structures are most likely products of unguided natural selection, intelligent design or some combination. Like other scientists, they advance their propositions by inference to the best possible explanation and conduct experiments that arise from these hypotheses.

They have discovered new planets and worked on the finely tuned nature of the universe and earth, the initial conditions necessary to support life, the origin of irreducibly complex life including DNA transcription, the origin of major body plans in the Cambrian explosion, biological disparity and species diversity, and the processes of mutation, such as those involved in bacterial drug resistance.

EXPELLED

Intelligent design advocates hold prestigious degrees and have considerable scientific accomplishments but are often marginalized and sometimes even excluded from the scientific establishment in elite universities and other institutions. For example, in August 2013 a university president announced that the theory of intelligent design could not be taught in science classrooms.

Thus proponents who remain in universities work largely under the radar and keep their skepticism of Darwinian evolution and their metaphysical commitments hidden. Ben Stein’s popular film Expelled, though hotly criticized (by all the usual suspects), revealed a reality that ID proponents face often from the same people who paradoxically accuse the early Roman Catholic Church of persecuting Galileo for his doubts. (the coverage of and reaction to the movie “Expelled” are defacto proof of what Mary Poplin is writing about in her book. The Wiki article is a perfect example of media bias pretending to be impartial when reporting sources that disagree with their beliefs).

In an attempt to discount the academic rigor of intelligent-design theorists and their work, material naturalists often label its advocates creationists. The term creationist has suffered so much derision in the media that it makes it easy to dismiss ID out of hand without engaging the advocates’ scientific research and theory.

Unlike young-earth creationism, ID draws its metaphysics not from arguments about the age of the earth or man but from empirical scientific data revealing the design components that would be unlikely to have formed as a result of a slow process of evolution. Intelligent design advocates define themselves as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars seeking to understand the “prodigious evidence of design in nature.”

The Discovery Institute serves as the primary gathering place and think tank for intelligent-design advocates. They believe that the operations of the universe and the intricacies of living things are best explained by an intelligent, purposive design and reject theoretical propositions that solely material phenomena acting according to unguided processes brought the universe and nature into being.

toppling the religion of evolution …

Since 2001, over seven hundred scientists have signed Discovery’s Statement of Dissent from Darwinism, which reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The reason that ID refers to an intelligent designer rather than God is that some members of its community of scholars are agnostics, Muslims or Buddhists in addition to Jews and Christians. Even atheists like Nagel support their work as a viable theory. Nevertheless, one of the criticisms is that most intelligent-design theorists, in fact, do believe in God or at least that God is probable.

Philosopher of science and self-described “ex-Christian” Michael Ruse quips that their use of the words “intelligent designer” rather than God is “a terminological inexactitude.” Mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski, who calls himself a secular Jew, says of intelligent design theory, “I do not know whether any of this (intelligent design) is true. (but) I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.”

The point of this is that believing and using the wrong models is dangerous. Dangerous behaviour based on faulty models kills people. We find that in every field from Engineering, to Aerodynamics, to Social Sciences, bad models invariably get people killed either by engineering system failures, or biochemical system failures.

The Material Naturalists, and Secular Humanists pushing these failed models are not the ones dying, and they don’t care as long as their models are not questioned. Meanwhile, the ones doing the dying are us, the little guys in the street, the victims of guidelines and regulations and policies based on “an unproven theory” for the ego gratification and fat remuneration of policy makers and department heads and ministers? Yes Minister!